Friday, March 31, 2017

ARCHEOSTORIEJournal of Public Archaeology is the open access peer-reviewedscientific journal
that provides Italy with an arena to discuss issues such as the
management and communication of archaeological heritage and, more
widely, the role of archaeology into contemporary society. It produces
insightful analyses on significant initiatives aimed at involving the
public in archaeological and heritage issues, and bridging the gap
between our past and modernity.Despite the continuing growth of Public Archaeology as a field of
studies, the Italian interpretation of the subject is still heavily
under-investigated. As it was observed by Chiara Bonacchi (Public Archaeology, Vol. 12 No. 3, August 2013, 211–16 2009):

“This area is now beginning to be understood as concerned
with the preservation, communication and public use of archaeology.
However, the path towards a clearer definition of Archeologia Pubblica
as a formal area of teaching and research requires further and more
focused scrutiny if Public Archaeology is to become a way for Italian
archaeologists to demonstrate public value and fight the consequences of
the economic (and social) crisis we are experiencing.”

ARCHEOSTORIE aims to fill this gap encouraging academic debate on Public Archaeology in Italy and promoting and coordinating related activities.

The core of Archeostorie. Journal of Public Archaeology consists of a Topic of the year section with papers that analyze a specific subject from several points of view, and a Satura Lanx section with papers beyond the main theme.A News and Reviews section following the
scientific papers provides readers with first-hand reportages and
analyses of important events of the year. We also collect selected
archaeological works of fiction in the Archaeotales
section, as we are convinced that storytelling is a powerful way of
involving people in the love and appreciation of our past. But let’s
examine each section in depth.Our choice for our first Topic of the year was Small but kind of mighty.
Needless to say, we hope it to be auspicious for the Journal’s future.
In fact, successful projects generally ‘start small,’ but are conceived
by people who ‘think big.’ Even if they are actually ‘small,’ they can
have an enormous impact on the community they grow in, or even on
society at large. They may choose either to stay small or to grow, but
in both cases they prove to be influential and powerful.We looked for good small public archaeology projects whose powerful
impact on society was clearly described and analyzed but, above all,
measured. In short, we challenged archaeologists to evaluate their
public outreach activities in depth. We are proud of the result and we
consider it a first significant step towards the establishment in Italy
of public archaeology as an accurate and stringent practice.

About the project

The web is a fantastic tool, whose
applications and implications are progressing at an exponential rate. So
are the studies on Hellenistic and Imperial Central Asia, that really
have begun to develop in the 70s and are increasing since the last
twenty years. Websites dealing with ancient Central Asia exist, as well
as digitized version of books, articles and reviews on the subject. But,
even at the dawn of the “semantic web”, they are dispatched and thinly
spread, the consequences being a great difficulty for everyone to find
them and, often, the frustration to find digitized sources in a later
stage, way after it would be needed.

The work presented here is made of the
will to resolve this problem. This blog will mostly function like a
portal: internet ressources will be listed in a large bibliography, with
incorporated links to their current location on the web. This site will
not host books neither articles. In this way, if an author wants to
remove its work from the net, he won’t have to pay attention of this
website. It’s also a way to thank those authors for their work, by
repercuting in the statistics of their homepage the amount of views that
can bring our website.

The main focus of the works presented
here is what lays between Eastern Iranian plateau to the West and the
Ganges Valley to the East, the Russian steppes to the North and the
Indian Ocean to the South. This area don’t show any geographical unity,
but shall be taken as one entity to understand what happened during
Hellenistic and Imperial times in Antiquity. The chronological timeframe
will mostly be from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the
Sassanian uprising in 224 AD.

Most of the work will come from databases like Persee, Encyclopaedia Iranica Online or homepage of specialists. Partially available work like in GoogleBooks will maybe be added in a second time.

Trismegistos Collections is a systematic survey of all collections where
texts in TM are preserved. It currently counts 3750 collections in over
50 countries. For most, basic identification and the coordinates are
provided; for others, often detailed information about inventarisation
and history has been collected for the now obsolete Leuven Homepage of
Papyrus Collections [LHPC].

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Since 2012 Greta Franzini's Catalogue of Digital Editions
has been gathering digital editions in an attempt to survey and
identify best practice in the field of digital scholarly editing. Other
cataloguing initiatives do not provide the granular analysis of features
necessary to understand the rationale and methodology behind the
creation of an edition. The Catalogue is useful as it provides an
accessible record of standards and building tools used, and thus an
insight into past and present projects. For data-related questions,
please contact Greta Franzini. For instructions on how to contribute digital editions to the Catalogue, please visit this page.

This web application was developed to
deliver the Catalogue data to users in an interactive and user-friendly
manner, allowing them to browse, search, filter and order the projects
around their research interests. Should you have any questions, comments
or feedback, do not hesitate to get in touch with the developers Peter Andorfer and Ksenia Zaytseva or visit the application's GitHub Repository.

Welcome to www.bensira.org, the website devoted to the ancient and
medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the book of Ben Sira. These documents,
which are housed in Cambridge, Oxford, London, Paris, New York, Los
Angeles, and Jerusalem, are here presented in a single platform, to
allow the scholar and the interested layperson to view these precious
texts. To learn more about the remarkable recovery of the once-lost
Hebrew original of Ben Sira, and its presentation at our website, click
on 'Introduction'. To proceed directly to the images of the disparate manuscripts, click on 'View the Manuscripts'.
We invite you to explore, peruse the website, and learn more about the
book of Ben Sira, its contents, and its textual history.

This questionnaire aims at collecting information about what users expect or want from a digital edition. In this questionnaire, a digital edition is broadly defined as an edition or transcription of a text that makes use of digital technologies to enhance users' access and experience of the source material. It can be a completed or an ongoing project, and does not necessarily have to provide a critical commentary. A mere replica of a printed edition is, in this instance, not considered to be a digital edition.

The questionnaire contains 20 questions and is completely anonymous. We don’t ask for demographic information such as age, gender, ethnicity or religion. The results will be made publicly available and will be also included in Greta Franzini's PhD dissertation. Creators of digital editions may wish to consider these results for the improvement of their existing projects or in preparation for the development of new ones.

The questionnaire should take no more than 15 minutes to complete and closes on 30th April 2017. Please share it with colleagues and friends who might be able to contribute! For further information about this questionnaire or about how the data will be used, please contact Greta Franzini at g.franzini.11(AT)ucl.ac.uk

The task of the GDZ is to record data such as
prints, manuscripts and illustrations and to present them. Scientists,
teachers and students will find a large amount of scholarly relevant
texts in digitized form.

Make use of our extensive collections with more than 5 million digitized pages and read up on our services offered.

More informations about the Center for Retrospective Digitization (GDZ) you will find on the SUB Göttingen website.

Among the categories of content, the following relate most closely to Antiquity

This eJournal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts having a primary focus on the religions of
Greece and Rome. Papers dealing with specifically Greek or Roman religion will appear in
the appropriate subcategory, more general or comparative work in the General subcategory.
The Religions of Peripheral Cultures has its own subcategory. The subcategory for
Christianity has three subdivisions for History, Theology and Cult. Additional
subcategories and/or subdivisions of them will be added as appropriate.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.